To see the lunacy of the Green Energy Transition in a nutshell, or perhaps a ceramic pot, consider the news that two-thirds of a massive gas-fired power plant is moving from Illinois to Texas, leaving the politicians in Illinois who passed a law sentencing gas-fired power plants to death wondering why it literally packed up and hit the road. The background here, as Don Surber explains on Substack, is that in 2021 the Illinois legislature at the urging of Gov. J.B. Pritzker, passed the “Climate & Equitable Jobs Act” in 2021, garnering praise even from the Chicago Tribune, requiring the state to phase out hydrocarbon power generation by 2045 and slating some natural gas plants for execution earlier, by 2030. And now people who vowed to get rid of this form of energy are howling because it’s going away. What can they possibly have expected?

The specifics are that two-thirds of the Elwood plant in Will County, comprising six of its nine 150 megawatt gas turbines, was sold to a new owner, Hull Street Energy, which is literally disassembling it, loading it on trucks, and moving it to Texas. Not to its own home state of Maryland. To somewhere they have some understanding of power. And of economics.

What makes this story so instructive is that a certain mentality in public affairs, as long-standing as it is catastrophic, really does not believe in tradeoffs. And also does not believe that incentives matter. Indeed, the two are congenitally joined, because if you think people are constantly engaging in tradeoffs then you understand that changing the costs and benefits of different options will change their calculation of which choice is best on balance. And likewise, if you understand that people alter their decisions when incentives change you must grasp that they are forever weighing tradeoffs based on gains and losses from different options.

This observation might seem trite, especially to the kind of people skeptical of utopian schemes. Including, say, the Green New Deal or indeed a Climate & Equitable Jobs package. But the contrary mindset, that all good things come bundled together, and so do all bad ones, has in recent decades embraced climate alarmism with the usual devastating effect.

On this point we must take issue with Surber who wrote:

“But now the real goal of ending cheap energy is being revealed in real time – and peddled as an unintentional consequence. There are no unintended consequences in politics, just undisclosed real purposes.”

On the contrary, a great many people in politics are every bit as foolish and fanatical as they appear to be. As Surber himself seems to concede when he adds:

“Only now do the unwashed elitist masses in the Fourth Estate realize saving the world will hit utility customers hardest as Democrats seek to bring equality of income in which everyone is poor.”

If journalists could fail to grasp the real-world consequences of a policy, so could and indeed did its architects. In this case the goal wasn’t “ending cheap energy”, it was substituting what they thought would be cheap alternative energy for the old kind that, which turned out actually to be more expensive and less reliable in the long run.

Thus we agree with Surber’s knucklebone shampoo to the Tribune, which he quotes as gasping:

“This startling development should raise alarm bells in Springfield, which already has heard warnings from experts that power capacity could fall short of what’s needed in Illinois within the next five years.”

And indeed it has. But those bells don’t have people taking purposeful action to fix the incentives. They have them running in circles screaming and shouting because far from being scam artists with a far deeper understanding than they let on, they are precisely the shallow enthusiasts their public words and deeds suggest.

Indeed, Surber underlines, they were warned of this general outcome, if not the specific loading of this plant onto those trucks, five years ago when the bill was being debated, and laughed off the warning because they didn’t think the world works that way.

If you doubt it, consider that he also ridicules state Republicans, one of whom bleated:

“As lawmakers, we should be using an ‘all of the above’ approach to energy policy. Illinois can’t simply shut down coal and natural gas plants before reliable and affordable replacements are ready.”

Well, it can. Indeed, it is. But as to whether it’s prudent to rush slowly into Net Zero, Surber says:

“Why close coal and natural gas plants? Republicans need to stop accepting any premise from the propagandists in the progressive party because the party is run by power-mad partisans.”

Which to be blunt is an issue in a lot of political parties, of all philosophical stripes. What’s really wrong is that far too many alleged conservatives, including these ones, tacitly accept their adversaries’ premises and then, to their own bewilderment and onlookers’ dismay, find themselves advocating their conclusions because ideas have consequences.

The Tribune itself has belatedly realized that the departing two-thirds of a power plant generates as much power as each of two nearby nuclear reactors. And that power will be hard to replace. So why didn’t the journalists see it sooner?

Or this bit. As James Freeman wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

“the story gets even worse. This expensive Elwood breakup likely won’t even reduce emissions for a generation or more, if ever. The equipment moving to Texas will be put to work, and so will the equipment that stays behind in Illinois, thanks to the compulsion of Mr. Pritzker and his fellow Illinois Democrats to assault for-profit businesses and favor nonprofits.”

You see, the previous owner of the remaining third of the plant sold it to a cooperative, which is allowed to run it longer than a for-profit firm could have.

Result: job losses, inequity, blackouts and no climate benefits even if you believe that natural gas will incinerate the Earth while heating your home. Which is exactly what you’d expect from people who don’t understand incentives or tradeoffs. Unless of course you were one of them, in which case you’d stare slack-jawed, mumble “Duh what’s going on man?” then rush off the start another policy disaster.